IT

Until 22 November 2026, Punta della Dogana presents “Algebra”, Paulo Nazareth’s exhibition curated by Fernanda Brenner, a project that gives material form to the thought of errantry articulated in Édouard Glissant’s “Poetics of Relation”. Walking becomes an epistemic gesture, one capable of unsettling colonial geographies through the creation of symbolic economies and forms of reciprocity. The former Venetian customs house is thereby re-signified as an opaque archive of the repressed, where the memory of the Diaspora resurfaces from the abyss – not in search of a fixed origin, but to inhabit the unstable space of Relation.

For Édouard Glissant, the contemporary world can no longer be conceived as a transparent totality ordered according to linear genealogies and stable identities. In Poetics of Relation (1990), the Martinican philosopher weaves a new vision of the world beginning with the image of the Archipelago: a constellation of distant and seemingly separate islands that nevertheless remain ceaselessly interconnected through crossings and exchanges. It is a geography of Relation in which identities themselves become negotiable events, born from the possibility of encounter and from the uncertainty of the trajectories that traverse them.

Glissant opens Poetics of Relation with a metaphor: that of the slave ship, presented as the site of exile for Black bodies deported toward an unknown destination. Within this space, the enslaved peoples undergo a threefold experience of the abyss. The first consists in a condition of ontological suffering brought about by the sight of the ship’s hold – its belly. The second abyss is that of the vertiginous sea crossing. Finally, the third is embodied in the image of everything that has been left behind, where the abyss is experienced both as the terror of the new land and as the memory of the abandoned homeland. Those who have experienced the abyss abandon their fragmented root identity and recompose it into a new, branching network of learning. They live Relation, cultivating it as the oblivion of the abyss gradually gives way to an increasingly powerful memory. It is the collective consciousness of an experience of errantry and exile that enables identity to expand through the encounter with the Other. From this rupture emerges a subjectivity that can no longer be traced back to a single origin, but instead defines itself through the multiplicity of connections that constitute it. The ship thus becomes an emblematic figure of the modern world: not the symbol of a destination, but of permanent transit. Identity is an errant journey that manifests itself in Relation. For Glissant, errantry is neither an act of refusal nor an uncontrolled impulse towards abandonment; rather, he associates it with the very image of the rhizome – a network of roots that expands horizontally, branches out, encounters other roots and is transformed through contact with them. The thought of errantry is the thought of the relative, the transitory, of that which is brought into Relation and of that which relates.
The errant rejects universalizing abstractions and immerses themselves in the world’s opacity. The thought of errantry conceives totality while renouncing the desire to possess it. From this perspective, transit, travel, and encounter cease to function merely as metaphors and instead become concrete practices for the production of meaning.

ÉDOUARD GLISSANT AND PAULO NAZARETH

It is within this horizon that Paulo Nazareth’s life and artistic practice unfold – nomadic and transitory. He describes himself as an “elder” from Borum-Nak, the Indigenous name for present-day Belo Horizonte in his home state of Minas Gerais, a region marked by Indigenous legacies, the African diaspora, and profound colonial stratifications. His mestizo identity, traversed by Afro-descendant, Indigenous, and European genealogies, has become the site of a permanent tension around which his artistic practice has gradually developed into a way of life. From the very beginning of his career, Nazareth has adopted traversal as method, and the nomadic act of walking as both language and aesthetic-political stance. His works emerge from long journeys undertaken on foot across the Americas, Africa, and the Caribbean, where encounters, objects, images, and situations accumulate as traces of Relation within a nomadic archive of identities in perpetual negotiation. Traversing territories still etched by persistent colonial cartographies, Nazareth activates forms of listening and proximity with historically marginalized subjectivities: walking thus becomes an epistemic gesture, an exercise in the empathetic and shared experience of the abyss. Like Glissant’s errant, Nazareth does not seek an original root; rather, he inhabits the unstable space of Relation, where identity is continuously constructed and redefined through contact with the Other.

ALGEBRA: PAULO NAZARETH’S EXHIBITION AT PUNTA DELLA DOGANA

In Venice, on the upper floor of Punta della Dogana, the Pinault Collection presents Algebra, Paulo Nazareth’s major monographic exhibition curated by Fernanda Brenner. Starting from its very title, one can discern the same rupture, the same abyssal experience that, for Édouard Glissant, becomes the epistemic space in which Relation is constituted. Derived from the Arabic al-jabr, meaning “to set broken bones,” the word evokes algebra as the act of mending a fracture. For Nazareth, walking is the cathartic act of confronting the abyssal uprooting of the slave ship’s hold, crossing borders and dismantling colonial superstructures.
In Venice – a historical threshold between East and West – the artist reconfigures the spaces of the former customs house, once devoted to the control and classification of goods, into an opaque archive of what has been repressed. Here, the official document yields to the hidden trace, to forms of knowledge rooted in Relation, and to embodied memory. In doing so, Nazareth allows what colonial genealogies of history had concealed to re-emerge from the abyss: lives erased in the name of modernity, expropriations, silent diasporas, racial classifications, and the stereotypes embedded in everyday consumer goods. Commodity and the global market become pawns within colonial cartographies, revealing racialized forms, symbols of subalternity, and exoticizing appropriations of Afro-descendant and Indigenous peoples. In Products of Genocide (2010), Nazareth seals a number of these consumer products inside blocks of resin, interrupting their global circulation and crystallizing the colonial superstructure of the commodity within his opaque archive. Throughout his practice, economic exchange is transformed into a paradoxical and symbolic negotiation. This is exemplified in the exhibition’s central gallery, devoted to Cadernos de África, the project of empathetic auto-ethnography through which the artist engages his African roots. Here, Nazareth has stacked posters reproducing image-relics from his pilgrimage across the African continent, allowing visitors to acquire them in exchange for a few coins. This ritual exchange invokes Exu, the orixá who protects trade and exchange, making explicit the symbolic economies that transform his practice into a gesture of reciprocity. Nazareth is a merchant. He constantly exchanges the Other for ourselves, identification for identity, “high” art for “low” art made on cardboard and newspaper, he sells glasses of water, sugar, and soap, distributes flyers, barters space and time themselves.

Algebra is a symbolic marketplace, an opaque archive, a secular reliquary, an invisible archaeological site. It flees genealogies, chronologies, and mappings, choosing instead to proceed through fragments, events, situations, and small constellations. It materializes errantry itself – its infinite directions, its rhizomatic infiltrations – and bears witness to the irreducible singularity of Relation. Running like a fil rouge throughout the exhibition is a dense trail of salt crossing the galleries of Punta della Dogana, gradually outlining the profile of the hold of a tumbeiro, the slave ship that once traversed the Atlantic routes of the transatlantic slave trade. That funerary hold recalls the abyss evoked by Édouard Glissant: a space of violence, uprooting, and loss in which genealogies are shattered and the illusion of an identity grounded in a single origin dissolves. It is within the depths of that abyss that a new condition of being takes shape, marked by dispersion and Relation. The salt trail guides visitors towards the core of Paulo Nazareth’s practice, exemplified by Notícias de América, the journey on foot that took the artist from Minas Gerais to Miami in 2012. From that journey onwards, he began collecting fragments and constructing an archive of errantry, tracing diasporic routes and movements, traversing margins, connecting the Archipelago, and experiencing Relation. Walking thus becomes an empathetic mode of inhabiting the abyss of the Diaspora: it is through the very act of travelling that memories of forced migrations, uprooting, and coerced displacements resurfaced ‒ histories that have profoundly marked Indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples.
To walk is to allow oneself to be transformed by what one encounters. Every step interrupts the claim of a stable geography and restores the world to its relational dimension. If history has mapped borders and constructed the world through separation, Paulo Nazareth’s Algebra invites us instead to traverse it as an archipelago of reciprocity and encounters, demonstrating that there is no origin that is not already Relation.

Niccolò Freri

29 March ‒ 22 November 2026
Paulo Nazareth. Algebra
curated by Fernanda Brenner
Pinault Collection, Punta della Dogana
Dorsoduro 2, Venezia
Pinault Collection Palazzo Grassi Paulo Nazareth Algebra

The text has been translated in English using AI